


Epicentre

by asynchrony



Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, M/M, Multi, not sure where I'm going with it though, sorry to the lovely fury/coulson shippers but coulson is indeed currently dead in this fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-11-26 04:49:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asynchrony/pseuds/asynchrony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fury, Hill, and the gaps Coulson leaves behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

**one**

 

They live in a world where everything can (and does) go wrong, where espionage is merely a flimsy cover for the machinations SHIELD really engages in, the magnitude of which could do worse than level cities if a single incident were to go wrong. Yet Fury still believes in heroes, and Maria just cannot understand that.

He used to pass that off as Coulson’s belief. Nobody doubted that, not once Project Rebirth became common knowledge within the agency. Then she took him aside after a certain card trick and told him in no uncertain terms not to desecrate the memory of SHIELD’s most enigmatically capable agent with his own half-baked ideals.

It was bad enough that Coulson was always underestimated in life, and even worse that his accomplishments would never be publicly recognized. Stark and Rogers didn’t need to be encouraged to think of him as a naive paper-pusher.


	2. Chapter 2

**two**

 

The WSC interrogate her when they’ve clearly gotten nothing useful out of Fury’s unmasked hostility. She tells them he was an idiot, reckless and clinging to a hope which really should have been shown up as childish and futile. She tells them that the Avengers are a wildcard, a threat.

She tells them that despite all this, she feels that Fury’s actions meant the incident went as well as it could have, and she has his back.

She doesn’t add that their attempts to assert Midgardian (as she’s come to think of it) control over interplanetary situations reek of poorly calculated supremacist notions, and that wearies her far more than it does him.

She also doesn’t tell them that after the Avengers left for shawarma and PR teams were deployed, she and Fury fucked against a damaged outer wall, the turbine Stark had ‘fixed’ scattering golden sparks across the leather neither had removed, the deed no less fraught with tension for the chill seeping through bullet holes in the previously pressurised chamber.

Fury asks her brusquely, as she disconnects from the encrypted call, what she’s thinking. She matches his pace and asks him about the Avengers’ whereabouts. It’s small talk that goes nowhere. He watches her leave when as much becomes clear.

Supervising the repair of the bridge network, two days later, she remarks, “We never got to invite Coulson to join us, did we?”  
Fury looks at her, infinitely weary, and picks himself up from the crouch he had settled in, dismantling Stark’s bug. His coat billows out around him as he walks, the movement suddenly devoid of its usual showmanship.


	3. Chapter 3

**three**

 

If they had a home, Coulson would have been the stereotypical working wife, running himself thin between his job and his family. They’d have come home to the smell of home-cooked dinner and a tidy house. Fury’s the husband in this equation, she supposes; the breadwinner, the primary authority. She’s not sure where she fits in. Triads aren’t exactly ordinary. 

Then again, neither are SHIELD agents.

All she knows is that she used to come back from debriefings to find freshly-microwaved instant meals sitting on her desk, and now she doesn’t.

 

(She wonders if love is never suspecting those meals to be poisoned. If it is, she might agree with Romanoff: love is for children - and yet, she’s been compromised.)


	4. Chapter 4

**four**

 

She’s forty-one and looks twenty-eight.   
He’s fifty-six and has made a career out of looking it.

It’s interesting, she muses during her scheduled six hours off, that both of them have built their lives on agelessness, for entirely different reasons. Women, she knows, don’t gain the same authority with age that men do; Fury can get away with emphasizing the lines age has marked on his face, implying that he’s seen horrors others will never know, but she can’t. In some ways, his lost eye plays more to his advantage in the endless politicking than depth perception ever would have.

She wonders how Phil stayed out of this race to pause time. His thinning hair is - was - his eyepatch, she thinks. Made him the unassuming fly on the wall. There’s a place for leather trenchcoats and combat boots, and another for nondescript suits. 

She’s not very good at being disarming, and has no idea who to promote to deal with civilian situations which require it.


	5. Chapter 5

**five**

 

“You remind me of my ma, you know,” Nick informs her, his tone light with forced levity, his fingers idly tracing circles on her skin as they catch their breath.  
She ignores the obvious Oedipus joke. “She was a good woman?”  
“Yeah.” He hesitates. “A good person. Brave.”  
“I’m sorry,” she says. He stirs at that, glaring sharply at her.  
“You’re not.”  
“Okay, I’m not.”

They fall back into silence. More restless with every second, she sits up, casting a hand about for her clothes.  
“I didn't know about all this until she was killed,” he says to her back.  
It’s her turn to stop and stare. “SHIELD? Your fa- Nick Senior?”  
“All of it.”  
“Huh,” she murmurs.  
“I dragged him in with me.”

She can’t let him think like this: it’s too _civilian_ , for lack of a better word.  
“Tell me about him.”  
“I mention my mother and you ask about him.”  
She flips him the bird - it’s somehow exhilarating - and moves languidly across the bunker.  
“Go on. You were Marcus, he was...”  
“Cheese,” Nick sighs, and it’s so far from anything she’d have expected that she laughs, really _laughs_ for the first time in years, tears running down her cheeks until he stops scowling and lets a belly-deep chuckle loose. 

He doesn't tell her any more, and she certainly doesn't shed any more accidental tears, but that’s closer to healing than people like them usually get.


	6. Chapter 6

 

**six**

 

It's a slow day - as slow as it gets around SHIELD anyway - when Maria realizes. She wraps up her conversation with the technician, then heads to Fury's makeshift quarters at a pace just slightly too quick to be casual. The junior agents scatter and watch her move past with trepidation; that's good, she thinks. Keeps them on their toes. There's never such a thing as a slow day, anyway. You're no less likely to die horribly on a day with less activity, according to the paper their statisticians had completed just before the entire Chitauri incident.

It hadn't seemed appropriate for them to present it afterward, she remembers, pressing her mouth into a thin line. If Phil hadn't died during the whole thing, maybe it might have been considered appropriate at some point in the future, but she can't see herself ever approving it now that things have turned out this way.

Fury lets her in, and she waits the few seconds for the shielding to be re-enabled before opening without preamble.  
"You slept with Phil."  
"Phil."  
"Coulson, then."  
"I slept with Coulson."  
"Before."

He exhales, loud and long, breath whistling through the filtered air. "Took you long enough," he says finally.

She's the legendary Maria Hill, the woman whose speech is likened to a guided missile - blunt and always devastatingly to the point - and yet as it is she's just standing there dumbly with her boss and lover watching her with his all-too-knowing eye.

"Two hours," he eventually says. "Dismissed."

She leaves, and if she gains some perverse satisfaction from the way the juniors seem no less intimidated as she stalks out, that's nobody's business but her.


	7. Chapter 7

**seven**

 

Two hours, of course, turns into thirty-seven, and it's not helping Maria's mood any that when the entire debacle is resolved just enough for her to get a couple of hours off-duty, she can't find Nick anywhere. Actually—

She must be more tired than she thought, then. She reaches for her sidearm and levels it without looking as she enters her quarters, and when she's removed her mission paraphernalia from her person he's regarding her evenly from where he's sitting on her bed, hands steepled on his lap.  
"I could have you for insubordination," he says mildly.  
"I could say I didn't know it was you," Maria mutters, mechanically setting out two mugs. "Standard procedure."  
Nick chuckles. "You're bitter."  
She shuts the drawer with more force than strictly necessary. "I'm not."  
"Angry, then." He takes the mug she offers him. "I'm sorry."  
She settles cross-legged on the floor a good few metres away and blows on her tea. 

"I'll make it up to you," he promises.

_"How?"_

Her voice cracks on the word and it's too strident and too fragile all at once and she wants to take it back as soon as she realizes she's said it, but he's looking at her with something infinitely sad in his gaze.

"Come here," he says, and she does.

  
He maps her body thoroughly, all the while constructing an equally detailed picture of how Phil would have slotted in neatly between the two of them, like a missing puzzle piece. He murmurs the words into the shell of her ear as if to keep them from escaping from their shared warmth into the cold steel of reality, and for a moment, it works.


	8. Chapter 8

**eight**

 

The floor vibrates just a little differently under Maria's boots, probably because of new rotor failsafes. It's making her sick. The corridors are different. The _coffee_ is different.

It's always glaringly bright above the clouds, and Maria resents the way that makes the brand-new chrome and steel and fiberglass look bleakly alien. Her body's already betrayed her once today, leading her down a familiar path to an office that doesn't exist on this helicarrier. She's not sure why she suddenly wants to escape - this is the only place she's been able to call home for years, or the old one was, anyway.

Maria's ego isn't so big she doesn't understand that she needs to be looking after herself, no matter how much sequestering herself in her quarters with enough (disgusting) coffee to mask the smell of fresh paint and plastic feels like retreat from an invisible enemy.

 

"I didn't know you drew," Nick remarks mildly twenty minutes later, appearing over her shoulder before she can pretend that she wasn't turning coffee-cup stains into an indistinct face which nevertheless is clearly Phil's.

She knows that's not true, knows that he knows every detail of her high school transcript, that all she knew how to draw was faces but she got an A in art every year nevertheless, that the year everything went to hell she had been featured in a local exhibition. Knows that her portraits were lauded as the work of a prodigious youngster who could "somehow capture the heart and soul of each person she's depicted in six or seven terse brushstrokes". That her mother framed that newspaper clipping, and that it was destroyed four days later.

"I don't," she replies, quiet and tuneless as the humming of the generators.


End file.
